Cops bust insurance racket, raid office in Khoda

The police on Friday morning arrested six persons —three men and three women — for allegedly duping residents of money on the pretext of lucrative insurance policies through a fake call centre in Khoda colony.

The gang has duped people from various states of more than Rs 50 lakh, the police said.(SAKIB ALI/HT)

The police on Friday morning arrested six persons —three men and three women — for allegedly duping residents of money on the pretext of lucrative insurance policies through a fake call centre in Khoda colony.

The gang has duped people from various states of more than Rs 50 lakh, the police said.

The accused were identified as Deen Mohammad, Atul Mishra, Surendra Kumar, Nisha Pandey, Mili Chaudhary and Kanchan. Mohammad, from Delhi, is the prime accused. The rest are residents of Ghaziabad. The second prime accused, Mohsin, is absconding.

An FIR was registered under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code and IT Act.

Mohammad had made his fake PAN cards and Aadhar cards with different names, the police said.

The police said that the gang used to target less educated or illiterate people from Jharkhand, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh for their scam. “The main accused had stolen customer data from Life Insurance Company (LIC) and used to pose as insurance agents. Women would call the victims and ask them if they had any complaints regarding their policy, whether they wanted a quick loan in three hours or would tell them that LIC was offering them a bonus upon transfer of money to their account,” Salmantaj Patil, superintendent police (city), Ghaziabad, said.

He said that the women callers would mark interested and uninterested parties according to their response. If interested, the call recipient would be marked a VIP in their records and then called him from another phone to complete the deal.

“Initially, the caller would ask the victim to deposit Rs 2,000 or Rs 5,000 for processing a loan of lakhs or as a fee for changing their policy. Once they reached their target, they would destroy all contact numbers that were used in the process,” Patil said.

Mohammad said that the highest transaction made was of Rs 40,000, in Jharkhand.

“I had opened accounts in two banks —Union Bank and IndusInd Bank — with fake proofs to which the clients transferred the money,” Mohammad, who has studied up to class 12.

Mohammad hired the others on a monthly salary of Rs7,500.

“He (Mohammad) would deduct our salary even for missing one day. We did not know anything about the racket and we were offered the job by Mohammad a year ago,” Mishra, one of the accused, said.

The police said that the racket had been going on for the last two years and after every two-three months, they would shift to a new place.